The conventional account of anglophone Caribbean writing from the nationalist period often tends to focus on male writers. Early articulations of a Caribbean literary tradition overlooked many writers, especially women, who did not fit into the frameworks of canon-builders like Kamau Brathwaite and Kenneth Ramchand. Almost up to the end of the 1970s, Jean Rhys remained the single widely known woman author, while a generation of writers who were arguably closer to changing Caribbean realities were neglected. During the past twenty years, scholarship on Caribbean writing has sought to recuperate these writers and take seriously their contributions, addressing how these might challenge conventional accounts of Caribbean literary cultures and characteristics. The result has been an expanded sense of the aesthetic and political projects of the period – a period marked by significant sociopolitical change in countries increasingly asserting cultural specificities and moving towards political autonomy. This essay focuses on five early anglophone Caribbean women writers of diverse backgrounds: Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Una Marson, Elma Napier, and Sylvia Wynter. While making different aesthetic choices, these authors gave passionate voice to the dominant concerns of their time – in particular the anticolonial struggle, socioeconomic disparities, and racial/cultural identity – as well as articulating issues of gender.

Caribbean writing from the 1920s to the 1940s has not always received as much attention as the work published in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Close examination of this earlier period, however, illustrates that a wide range of fiction and poetry was published, much of it articulating aspects of a nationalist and anticolonialist perspective even as other projects arose from alternative historical contexts. Focusing on the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s also makes visible the generic and geographical diversity: poems, poetic anthologies, short fiction, and novels were written and published throughout the islands as well as in England and the United States. As a result, this early twentieth-century writing represents the range of contexts to which Caribbean writing responded: the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution; migration within the region and into metropolitan locations; the Harlem Renaissance; Marxism; attention to local ecologies that also critiques the spread of global capital; the rise of US imperialism in the region; the Great Depression; and the crisis of the British Empire beginning with the labour unrest of the mid-1930s. Consideration of single works and anthologies from the 1920s to the 1940s exposes the tensions between an indigenous consciousness and concepts of literary form imposed or absorbed at the junction of empire, migration, and coloniality.